As the volume of electronic mail sent and received by computer users increases, the amount of time those computer users spend using programs for sending and receiving electronic mail messages (“email clients”) also increases. This increase in the use of email clients has created an incentive for providers of email clients to add additional functionality to email clients. As one example, some providers of email clients have added to their email clients functionality for managing contact information and schedule information, transforming them into programs sometimes referred to as personal information managers (“PIMs”).
Because PIMs provide more functionality than simpler email clients, they are often used for even greater periods of time than email clients. Additionally, PIMs maintain an even greater body of information relating to their users than do simpler email clients. These differences create an even greater incentive to expand PIMs to include even more functionality, especially additional functionality that is related to the PIM's existing functionality and makes use of or builds on the data already maintained by the PIM.
While it is relatively straightforward for the provider of a PIM to add additional functionality to that PIM, there are often significant obstacles inhibiting third-party providers from adding additional functionality to a PIM, even in cases where the provider of the PIM ostensibly provides add-on support to such third-party providers. In particular, such PIMs typically lack support for adding additional kinds of data to the data stored by the PIMs, and typically lack support for adding functionality to receive, display, edit, or otherwise process additional kinds of data within the PIM. Accordingly, a third party add-on must often separately maintain its own data, synchronize the data it separately maintains with the data maintained “natively” by the PIM, and coordinate its activities with the PIM rather than being able to modify the data storage and processing performed natively by the PIM.
In view of the foregoing, successful approaches for coordinating the activity of a PIM with a third-party add-in and synchronizing shared data between a PIM and a third-party PIM add-in would have significant utility.